Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP

Illustration: Jessica Eaton

The HTTP standard, the language of web servers, was born humbly in 1990 as the hypertext transfer protocol. HTTP was basically just a few verbs—simple commands—that a browser said to a web server. The most essential of these were GET, which asks a server for information, and POST, which sends info back. There were no fine-grained access controls or bidirectional links. There was no payment system. HTTP has always been just … barely … enough. But over time people came to accept it. When they wanted to improve it, as Twitter and many others have, they just built atop it, with APIs.

This approach has been so successful that the HT part of HTTP, the “hypertext” part, is far less descriptive than it used to be. Much of the traffic that flows through the web is pure data objects, not text-with-links. We have dynamic status updates, maps that zoom with a scrollwheel, and yet underneath it’s still all HTTP.

HTTP is simple, constrained, ultimately a little boring. But without it we’d have no Wikipedia, no Facebook. It’s possible our huge online communities could have arisen through some other system, but there’s no reason for alternative history when you have the real thing: That simple loop between browser and server (GET a page, POST a response) has led to the weirdest flowering of creativity in history.

Why weirdest? Because there has never been a creative medium so unfettered. It’s not just that web servers proved to be an unprecedentedly cheap way to distribute ideas. Through its hand-off nature, HTTP also created an unbelievable tension: It was so simple, so resolutely nonprescriptive, that most of the questions about how to use it—about passwords, privacy, and most of all content—were left to us.

Every new idea that piggybacked onto HTTP would entail endless debates over the rules. Which is why the remarkable communities of the web—Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, Wikipedia—are on a fundamental level just different ways of defining a commons. Yes, Wikipedia is a very large set of encyclopedia pages, but at its core it’s really a community dedicated to enforcing the norms of Wikipedia. Its polar opposite is the seemingly lawless 4chan, but that site, too, lives by its own rigid norms—hence the designation of “newfags” who have yet to internalize the unofficial code. The Internet is so defined by debates over rules that its rules sometimes begin as parodies of rules. Rule 34 holds that “if it exists, there is porn of it” — leading to all sorts of generative behavior, like people creating images that show Africa humping South America.

In its wonderful vagueness, HTTP encoded a profoundly upbeat idea about our ability to come together, to fill in the blanks. And that crazy optimism has proven to be correct. Over the past two decades HTTP has forced us, almost accidentally, to clarify what sorts of information are worth defending. It has forced us to articulate who owns what. It gave work to the admin or moderator, the person who could tease out the rules and, for better or worse, make sure that others follow them.

It’s that leap of faith that made HTTP the most important technology of the past 20 years. That simple handshake is the firmament upon which we have built trillion-dollar cathedrals and bazaars, the base upon which we construct other protocols and networks. Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.

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